#HELP ME THIS IS TORTURE

[ohrade]

i love being on my break at work ^_^

[malinaa]

if i think about the hunger games in peeta's perspective i WILL start sobbing

[brucewaynehater101]

For those Titan's Tower AUs where Tim is all like, "That's Jason, so I'll let him torture/kill me when he pops by," what if Red Hood walks in on Robin being extra prepared. Tim greets him at the door with a smile, beckons him on over, and shows him the table of torture devices he gathered. It's almost like a kid trying to show their parent the amazing job they did in hopes they'll be praised.

"I wasn't sure which ones you preferred to use, so I grabbed a variety just in case."

[kingofmyborrowedheart]

I really love the little detail of paw prints on the promotional posts for THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT because all of this stuff is coming from Taylor’s desk, so of course the cats would be stepping all over her desk and leaving their marks on her documents.

[deltapelagicpetrel]

alright time for my once-in-a-quarter post, this time the topic is griddlehark!!!!!!!! I love them so much i sure hope nothing bad happens to them ever hahahaha

[bi-writes]

the knock at his door is a ferocious one. it rattles the hinges, shakes the doorway. it is not a kind knock. it is the knock of anger, of impending terror, of death at his door, but he knows that if he doesn't answer, he will be even more sorry. (ghoap x curvy!fem!reader, 18+, smidge of dark)

johnny isn't happy. he yanks the door open, glaring, knowing who is on the other side. his superior, his lieutenant, the fucking tart that started this whole thing in the first place, the bastard that stands a few inches too tall, is that what she sees in him, too tall, is that much bigger than me, the fucking--

"dinnae want t'talk to ye, ye fuckin'--"

"'f y'know wot's fuckin' good f'ya, you'll shut y'r fuckin' mouth," ghost snaps. his accent is thick and gravelly. he moves over the threshold, pushing johnny back, his eyes dulling over as he presses an accusing finger against johnny's chest. "y'r gonna pick up the bloody phone, 'n y'r gonna call 'er."

"she's a right--"

ghost hisses, a heady growl coming out roughly as he grips johnny around the throat and slams him against the nearest wall. the entirety of it shakes, and the pictures there nearly fall, and johnny chokes as he tries to scramble, but ghost is too strong, too rough, too overpowering. there is something behind his movements, some purpose, and it makes something acidic bubble in johnny's throat.

"don't you fuckin' dare finish that sentence," ghost snarls. "don't care wot it is y'think y'feel, do y'really wanna have tha' on your conscious, y'fuckin' bastard, yeah? want her t'know tha' is the last thing y'called her?"

johnny sputters. he's gasping for air, but it's hard, and his eyes water. even though johnny hates him, even though he loathes the man he used to admire, he knows ghost is right. his lip trembles. it wouldn't be right to say it, it wouldn't be right to call you anything other than what you are, and that is beautiful, bonnie, the stars in the sky and the water in the soil and the dream he always has but cannot remember but one he knows is all he wants and more.

"ye took 'er from me," johnny gasps. "took her from me, and she's all i've ever wanted..."

"took nothin' from ya. now call 'er," ghost growls. "pick up the phone, and y'call her. she's hysterical. 'n i won't 'av it."

"ye won't 'av it? fuck off with ye!"

ghost tilts his head to the side, using his forearm now and pinning johnny to the wall. they meet eyes, and even though johnny pulls a brave face, he is staring at a man who clawed his way out of his grave. a man that endured days of torture and inexplicable horror, that knew the taste of his own blood from another's. johnny is strong-willed, but this is a battle he will not win.

"won't tell ya again," ghost mutters. "i mean tha'."

johnny's tired. he loathes. he hates. he feels sick. he wants to claw and kill and blow something up, but then ghost is letting him go, he's taking in full breaths, and there's a voice in his ear suddenly, an unfamiliar sound of a beautiful voice that he knows. she's crying.

"johnny? j-johnny, i-is that you?"

"mmmph," he coughs. "mmm..."

even riddled with sadness, you sound as pretty as always.

"johnny, i'm sorry," you whimper. he can picture your face, probably a gorgeous pout, tears gathering along your cheeks that normally are from the brunt of his cock, but now they're the proper response from your panic. "johnny, i'm...i'm so sorry--"

"'s..." he hums. "'s a'right, lovey. shhh. quiet."

"johnny, please--please come home, i-i...i can't stand this, i don't want to...i-i--"

"told ye to quiet," he murmurs. "quiet."

and you do, but he knows there's tears, he knows you're probably still there on the other side, your cries muffled into your hand. you probably still look so beautiful, probably sitting there in one of his jackets and nothing else, perched on the bed he shares with you and looking like an entire meal.

"ye lied to me, bonnie," johnny tuts, and ghost steps closer, into his space. watch it, his eyes say, and johnny glares. "why did ye lie?"

you whine, "i didn't know what to say...i...i just thought--"

"ye thought what?" johnny prods. "ye thought i would nae find out about it all? what did ye think, what the bloody fuckin' hell did ye--"

ghost walks forward, enough that johnny is pressed flat against the wall. ghost leans down, tilting his head, close enough that he feels the warmth of johnny's breath as they stare down each other.

"say y'love 'er, johnny," ghost mumbles in his ear. he comes closer, one thick thigh fitting between johnny's legs. "say it."

johnny swallows. "i love ye, bonnie."

a quiet whine, and then your soft voice, "i-i love you so much, johnny--"

"say y'want her, johnny," ghost encourages him, in that low voice that is starting to make johnny's head a little lighter.

"i miss ye," johnny whispers. "sorry for not having me head on right, love..." he hisses when ghost pinches him. "ahh--i want ye. want yer bonnie face...yer bonnie cunt...got to know it. got to know how much i want ye."

ghost shuts his eyes when he hears your breaths. desperate, a little emotional, that beautiful lilt that drew him in the first time.

"tell 'er ye want to eat 'er, johnny," ghost hums. "tell 'er she tastes like sweets." ghost comes closer, his pelvis against johnny's, and there is no space between them. johnny's blue eyes are bright, pupils dilated, and when ghost opens his eyes, they stare at each other, some kind of understanding that they have never had before.

they've been to the same place. they've seen the same eden. the love of the same woman, the taste of the same forbidden fruit, the kind of thing that men like them dream of having but give up for the sake of their sanity--

"want to eat ye, love..." johnny sighs, and his eyes flutter when ghost reaches up and smooths a gloved hand along his throat. his adam's apple bobs, he is so alive, and ghost tuts lowly as he speaks. "taste so good...think about it all the time...about getting under yer skirt," he sighs deeply when ghost's hand moves lower, against his chest, "cum so nice, bonnie, when ye sit on m'face..."

"j-johnny--" ghost grits his teeth when he hears you. pretty baby girl, probably squeezing your thick thighs together, maybe leaning over to show off your soft hips to no one in particular, tits pressed together because your hand is drifting low and circling against you because he knows you probably aren't wearing any fucking knickers, "anything for you, baby...you know i would, you know i'd do anything..."

"i know, my pretty," johnny coos. "will ye wait for me? will ye wait before ye get ahead of yerself, love? ye will, yer a good girl..."

"y-yes--" you whine. "y-yes, i'll wait for you...please come back...please--"

"should i bring back yer keeper?" johnny asks. blue eyes on dark ones, the look of a thousand words, the look of newness, of acceptance, of the power of two being so much greater than one.

two gloved fingers make their way down his throat. petting johnny's pink tongue, stuffing him full, reminding him of his place, where he truly is, where he belongs and where he is always meant to be. he relaxes his throat, and ghost snarls, satisfied, when johnny takes the girth of it easily. he touches the back of johnny's throat, and ghost's eyes flash when he hears your sweet voice on the other end.

"simon...i know you're there. be nice. or we won't get to play."

[selemina]

I finally watched Animator VS Animation. I uh... I have feels. Those are some EXPRESSIVE stickmen, damn! If anything, AVA is a masterclass on body language! But it also happens to be fun, spectacular, emotional and beautiful! So much effort goes into every episode, I as a fellow animator I am measuring the amount of work and I am HORRIFIED! So it is time for another episode of "Sel finds stuff on the internet" : Go watch AVA! You won't be disappointed!

[m4sonn]

Ya’ll need to hear this stuff fr 🔥🔥

[adhdandcomics]

perhaps the most important question i’ve ever asked:

does anyone have tips for people trying to stop being chronically late to everything in the world that aren’t weirdly judgmental and aggressive or flat out lies

[fatehbaz]

patience being tested. being forced by a bizarre unfortunate situation to adhere to university requirement technicality by taking this simple basic elementary "introduction to environmental history" class.

this class is from facilitators/program which do, like, "history of the American frontier" or "history of fishing and hunting" and still basically subscribe to that old-school twentieth-century idealization and celebration of characters like Teddy Roosevelt and reverence for a mythical arc-of-history-bent-towards-justice narrative of the often-clumsy but ultimately-benevolent US federal government and its mission to "save nature" through the miracle of "sustained yield," while heroic federal land management agencies and "heritage" institutions lead to way, staffed by exceptional individuals (appeals to nostalgia for the frontier and an imagined landscape of the American West; ego-stroking appeals to flattering self-image that center the environmentalist or academic). where they invoke, y'know, ideas like "ecology is important because don't you enjoy cross-country skiing in The Woods with your niece and nephew? don't you like hunting and fishing?" which makes it feel like a time capsule of appeals and discourses from the 1970s. and it invokes concept of "untouched wilderness" (while eliding scale of historical Indigenous environmental relationships and current ongoing colonial violence/extractivism). but just ever-so-slightly updated with a little bit of chic twenty-first-century flair like a superficial land acknowledgement or a reference to "labor histories" or "history from below," which is extra aggravating when the old ideologies/institutions are still in power but they're muddying the water and diluting the language/frameworks (it's been strange, watching words like "multispecies" and "Anthropocene" over the years slowly but surely show-up on the posters, fliers, course descriptions, by now even appearing adjacent to the agri-business and resource extraction feeder programs, like a recuperation or appropriation.) even from a humanities angle, it's still, they're talking at me like "You probably didn't know this, but environmental history is actually pretty entangled with political and social events. In fact, we can synthesize sources and glean environmental info from wacky places like workers' rolls in factories, ship's logs, and poetry from the era." and i'm nodding like YEP.

the first homework assignment is respond to this: "Define and describe 'the Anthropocene'. Do you think 'the Anthropocene' is a useful concept? Why or why not?" Respond in 300 words.

so for fun, right now in class, going to see how fast i can pull up discussion of Anthropocene-as-concept solely from my old posts on this microblogging site.

---

ok, found some

---

I think that the danger in any universal narrative or epoch or principle is exactly that it can itself become a colonizing force. [...] I’m suspicious of the Anthropocene as concept for the very reason that it subsumes so many peoples, nations, histories, geographies, political orders. For that reason, I think ideas like the Anthropocene can be a useful short-hand for a cluster of tangible things going on with the Earth at the moment, but we have to be very careful about how fluid and dynamic ideas become concretized into hegemonic principles in the hands of researchers, policymakers, and politicians. There’s so much diversity in histories and experiences and environmental realities even between relatively linked geographies here in Canada [...]. Imagine what happens when we try to do that on a global scale - and a lot of euro-western Anthropocene, climate change and resilience research risks doing that - eliding local specificities and appropriating knowledge to serve a broader euro-western narrative without attending to the inherent colonial and imperial realities of science and policy processes, or even attending to the ways that colonial capitalist expansion has created these environmental crises to begin with. While we, as a collective humanity, are struggling with the realities of the Anthropocene, it is dangerous to erase the specific histories, power-relations, political orders that created the crisis to begin with. So, I’m glad that a robust critique of the Anthropocene as a concept is emerging.

Text by: Words of Zoe Todd, as interviewed and transcribed by Caroline Picard. “The Future is Elastic (But it Depends): An Interview with Zoe Todd.” 23 August 2016.

---

---

---

The Great Acceleration is the latest in a series of human-driven planetary changes that constitute what a rising chorus of scientists, social scientists, and humanists have labeled the Anthropocene - a new Age of Humans. [...] But what the Anthropocene label masks, and what the litany of graphs documenting the Great Acceleration hide, is a history of racial oppression and violence, along with wealth inequality, that has built and sustained engines of economic growth and consumption over the last four centuries. [...] The plantation, Sidney Mintz long ago observed, was a “synthesis of field and factory,” an agro-industrial system of enterprise [...]. Plantation legacies, along with accompanying strategies of survival and resistance, dwell in the racialized geographies of the United States’ and Brazil’s prison systems. They surface in the inequitable toxic burdens experienced by impoverished communities of color in places like Cancer Alley, an industrial corridor of petrochemical plants running along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where cotton was once king. And they appear in patterns of foreign direct investment and debt servitude that structure many land deals in the Caribbean, Brazil, and sub-Saharan Africa [...]. [C]limatologists and global change scientists from the University of London, propose instead 1610 as a date for the golden spike of the Anthropocene. The date marked a detectable global dip in carbon dioxide concentrations, precipitated, they argue, by the death of nearly 50 million indigenous human inhabitants [...]. The degradation of soils in the tobacco and cotton-growing regions in the American South, or in the sugarcane growing fields of many Caribbean islands, for example, was a consequence of an economic and social system that inflicted violence upon the land and the people enslaved to work it. Such violent histories are not so readily evident in genealogies that date the Anthropocene’s emergence to the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago, the onset of Europe’s industrial revolution circa 1800, or the Trinity nuclear test of 1945. Sugarcane plantations were already prevalent throughout the Mediterranean basin during the late middle ages. But it was during the early modern era, and specifically in the Caribbean, where the intersection of emerging proto-capitalist economic models based on migratory forced labor (first indentured servitude, and later slavery), intensive land usage, globalized commerce, and colonial regimes sustained on the basis of relentless racialized violence, gave rise to the transformative models of plantations that reshaped the lives and livelihoods of human and non-human beings on a planetary scale. [...] We might, following the lead of science studies scholar Donna Haraway and anthropologist Anna Tsing, more aptly designate this era the Plantationocene. [...] It is also an invitation to see, in the words of geographer Laura Pulido, “the Anthropocene as a racial process,” one that has and will continue to produce “racially uneven vulnerability and death." [...] And how have such material transformations sustained global flows of knowledge and capital that continue to reproduce the plantation in enduring ways?

Text by: Sophie Sapp Moore, Monique Allewaert, Pablo F. Gomez, and Gregg Mitman. "Plantation Legacies." Edge Effects. 22 January 2019. Updated 15 May 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

---

---

---

Geologists and other scientists will fight over [the definition of the beginning start-date of the Anthropocene] in scientific language, seeking traces of carbon dioxide that index the worst offenses of European empire which rent and violated the flesh, bodies, and governance structures of Indigenous and other sovereign peoples in the name of gold, lumber, trade, land, and power. [...] The stories we tell about the origins of the Anthropocene implicate how we understand the relations we have with our surrounds. In other words, the naming of the Anthropocene epoch and its start date have implications not just for how we understand the world, but this understanding will have material consequences, consequences that affect body and land.

Text by: Heather Davis and Zoe Todd. On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME An International Journal for Critical Geographies. December 2017. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

---

---

---

From Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, Eduoard Glissant, through Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, and so many others, critical anticolonial and race theory has been written from the specific histories that marked the Black Atlantic. [...] Glissant also reminds us, secondly, of how cunning the absorptive powers of [...] liberal capitalism are - how quickly specific relations are remade as relations-erasing universal abstractions. [...] This absorptive, relations-erasing universalism is especially apparent in some contemporary discourses of […] liberalism and climate collapse - what some call the Anthropocene - especially those that anchor the crisis in a general Human calamity which, as Sylvia Wynter has noted, is merely the name of an overdetermined and specific [White] European man. […] [T]he condition of creating this new common European world was the destruction of a multitude of existing black and brown worlds. The tsunami of colonialism was not seen as affecting humanity, but [...] these specific people. They were specific - what happened to them may have been necessary, regrettable, intentional, accidental - but it is always them. It is only when these ancestral histories became present for some, for those who had long benefitted from the dispossession [...], that suddenly the problem is all of us, as human catastrophe.

Text by: Elizabeth Povinelli. “The Ancestral Present of Oceanic Illusions: Connected and Differentiated in Late Toxic Liberalism.” e-flux Journal Issue #112. October 2020.

---

The narrative arc [of White "liberal humanism"] [...] is often told as a kind of European coming-of-age story. […] The Anthropocene discourse follows the same coming-of-age [...] script, searching for a material origin story that would explain the newly identified trajectory of the Anthropos […]. Sylvia Wynter, W.E.B. DuBois, and Achille Mbembe all showed how that genealogy of [White subjecthood] was [...] articulated through sixteenth- through nineteenth-century [historiographies and discourses] in the context of colonialism, [...] as well as forming the material praxis of their rearrangement (through mining, ecological rearrangements and extractions, and forms of geologic displacements such as plantations, dams, fertilizers, crops, and introduction of “alien” animals). […] As Wynter (2000) commented, “The degradation of concrete humans, that was/is the price of empire, of the kind of [Eurocentric epistemology] that underlies it” (154).

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. “The Inhumanities.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Volume 11, Issue 3. November 2020.

---

---

---

As Yarimar Bonilla suggests in regard to post-Irma-and-Maria Puerto Rico, “vulnerability is not simply a product of natural conditions; it is a political state and a colonial condition.” Many in the Caribbean therefore speak about the coloniality of disaster, and the unnaturalness of these “natural” disasters [...]. Others describe this temporality by shifting [...] toward an idea of the Plantationocene [...]. As Moore and her colleagues write, “Plantation worlds, both past and present, offer a powerful reminder that environmental problems cannot be decoupled from histories of colonialism, capitalism, and racism that have made some human beings more vulnerable [...].” [W]e see that contemporary uneven socioecologies associated with the rise of the industrial world ["the Anthropocene"] are based [...] also on the racialized denial and foreshortening of life for the sacrificial majority of black, brown, and Indigenous people and their relegation to the “sacrifice zones” of extractive industry. [...] [A]ny appropriate response to the contemporary climate emergency must first appreciate its foundations in the past history of the violent, coercive, transatlantic system of plantation slavery; in the present global uneven development, antiblackness, and border regimes that shape human vulnerability [...] that continues to influence who has access to resources, safety, and preferable ecologies [...] and who will be relegated to the “plantation archipelagoes” (as Sylvia Wynter called them) [...].

Text by: Mimi Sheller. “Thinking Beyond Coloniality: Toward Radical Caribbean Futures.” Small Axe (2021), 25 (2 (65)), pages 169-170. Published 1 July 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

---

---

---

Indigenous genocide and removal from land and enslavement are prerequisites for power becoming operationalized in premodernity [...]; it was/is a means to operationalize extraction (therefore race should be considered as foundational rather than as periphery to the production of those structures and of global space). [...] Wynter suggests that we […] consider 1452 as the beginning of the New World, as African slaves are put to work on the first plantations on the Portuguese island of Madeira, initiating the “sugar-slave” complex - a massive replantation of ecologies and forced relocation of people […]. Wynter argues that the invention of the figure of Man in 1492 as the Portuguese [and Spanish] travel to the Americas instigates at the same time “a refiguring of humanness” in the idea of race. [...] The natal moment of the 1800 Industrial Revolution, […] [apparently] locates Anthropocene origination in […] the "new" metabolisms of technology and matter enabled by the combination of fossil fuels, new engines, and the world as market. […] The racialization of epistemologies of life and nonlife is important to note here […]. While [this industrialization in the nineteenth century] […] undoubtedly transformed the atmosphere with […] coal, the creation of another kind of weather had already established its salient forms in the mine and on the plantation. Paying attention to the prehistory of capital and its bodily labor, both within coal cultures and on plantations that literally put “sugar in the bowl” (as Nina Simone sings) […]. The new modes of material accumulation and production in the Industrial Revolution are relational to and dependent on their preproductive forms in slavery […]. In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners for their lost "property"] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain and its colonial enterprises and empire. [...] A significant proportion of funds were invested in the railway system connecting London and Birmingham (home of cotton production and […] manufacturing for plantations), Cambridge and Oxford, and Wales and the Midlands (for coal). Insurance companies flourished [...]. The slave-sugar-coal nexus both substantially enriched Britain and made it possible for it to transition into a colonial industrialized power […]. The slave trade […] fashioned the economic conditions (and institutions, such as the insurance and finance industries) for industrialization.

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

[guzhufuren]

tapping the sign in the kindest and most well meaning way possible

[starry-bi-sky]

I'm in A Mood™ (stressed) so im going back to my roots of melting two character together into one person. So bruce wayne!danny fenton. Danny Fenton who, for eight years, grew up in a beautiful gothic manor with his mom and dad under the name "Bruce Wayne". Playing piano with his mother, running around the manor with his father.

Then when he's eight it's ripped away from him. There's blood on his hands and pearls pooling at his feet, and both his parents are dead in front of him.

And he gets shipped off to distant relatives "the Fentons" shortly after, Alfred close on his heels because someone needs to take care of him, someone that knows him. Bruce goes to the Fentons for the safety of anonymity. Gotham's press wants to sink its teeth into him.

Danny misses his city even if it took everything from him. There are shadows in his eyes and he's pale as a sheet even beside his distant cousins, and they change his name to "Danny Fenton' because nobody should know that their newest child was illustrious orphan Bruce Wayne.

They call him Bruce behind closed doors. Danny prefers it that way, he clings onto the name -- the one his parents gave him -- like a lifeline. He makes friends with Sam and Tucker. Tucker takes one look at the willowy, morbid little boy standing in the corner like a shade, ghosts in his eyes, and drags him out into the sunlight, and takes him over to Sam.

When Danny is twelve, he's still not over it -- and he's a little obsessed with the Fentons' research, with the morbid. He has books upon books on death, murder, detective work. Anything he can get his hands on. And stars. He loves stars.

Alfred owns the apartment next to them and comes over regularly. Danny clings to him.

When Danny is twelve, he's still quiet, meek, a shy little thing prone to being bullied. Freaky little Fenton with the night in his eyes and too-cold skin even before he put one foot in the grave. in a sleepover in his room with Sam and Tucker, he tells them the truth. They're his friends, he trusts them.

"My name is Bruce." he murmurs, voice quiet as the breeze, always quiet. he's staring at his star-covered sheets.

"Like Bruce Wayne?" Tucker asks, a joking tone in his voice.

Danny smiles a little, lamb-like with insecurity. "I am Bruce Wayne." And he takes them down to the lab, disrupting Maddie and Jack, to prove it. Sam tells them of her own wealth then shortly after. They start calling Danny "Bruce" in private too -- its trust. Thats what it is. It's trust.

Sam goes to media functions and comes back with aching feet and complaints on her tongue -- and Danny soaks it up all like a sponge, splayed across a beanbag chair with Tucker in her room. He's not envious of her, he used to go to events with his parents and they kept him safe from the ugly of Gotham's Elite. For the most part. He's had comments made at him, he doesn't miss them.

Alfred returns to the manor semi-regularly, Danny goes with him. he wanders the hallways and helps Alfred clean, the last thing either of them want is for their home to fall into disrepair. He brings Jazz with him next time, then Tucker, then Sam. They all help him clean, and he shows them his room. The one across from his parents', it feels strange.

When Danny dies when he's fourteen, the first adult he tells is Alfred. He and Jazz go over to his house more often than they stay in the Fentonworks building. At least at Alfred's, the food doesn't come to life. Alfred sits at the kitchen table and weeps when Danny tells him, Jazz is upstairs, and its just the two of them.

Danny's ghost form wears pearls around his wrist and the gloves look stained with some kind of black substance. He looks like a child who died in a lab accident, but he also looks like a child who has shadows dripping off his shoulders, curling at his feet, hanging from his eyes.

because amorphous blob batman has my heart always and danny/bruce will not escape it even in death even if that IS the only reason im giving him Mild BatBlob Vibes...so far

when they go to the manor, alfred helps danny make a pile of stones between Martha and Thomas' graves, nobody but the two of them (and sam and tucker) will know what it means. (not even bruce's children later down the line, not for a long, long time)

danny dives into ghost fighting on shaky feet and not half as witty as he once was in one world. he's skittish, skittering between blasts from shadow to shadow and clumsily making his way through each battle. but helping people lights a fire in him. he still has shadows dripping off his feet but there's a purpose in his eyes.

and god help him, he's going to help people.

[moongothic]

Madoka is the promise you won't turn from a child, full of hopes and dreams and the wish to save the world, into a bitter adult who just wants to hurt others and ruin people's lives

Madoka promised to be there for you to remind you of the person you wanted to be and to stop you from becoming what you sought to destroy

Madoka made that promise and became the very embodiment of it

[inoreuct]

thinking about zoro being the crew's main protector.

it’s quite literally his role amongst the straw hats; luffy's captain, usopp's their sniper, sanji cooks, nami navigates, chopper's their doctor, franky's their shipwright, jinbei's their helmsman and brook's their musician but zoro? zoro's their swordsman. zoro’s their guardian. his job is to be the first line of defense and protect everybody else so they can focus on doing their own thing and sure, none of them really need protecting— but they don't have to worry about defending themselves, either, because whoever they can't or don't want to handle zoro will finish up (if he hasn't gotten to them first).

like imagine a bunch of idiots cornering one of the crew (bad idea.) and picking nami because she's the woman without a devil fruit, as opposed to robin (BAD idea.). they've got her surrounded in the dead end of an alleyway and have somehow neutralised her clima-tact and she’s not worried, she’s not.

but against twelve men and with her weapon essentially now just a regular staff, she might be panicking. just a little. she’s gotten a couple of them good enough that they’re down for the count before a chain wrapped around her ankle trips her. it pulls at enough memories, faded but never forgotten, to bring up a sickening wave of fear and anger— and nami decides that she’s had enough of the bullshit.

she takes a deep breath and screams. “ZORO!”

the silence afterwards is deafening. the wind shifts, gently lifting the pieces of hair stuck to her sweaty face, and the men laugh uneasily. one of them yanks hard on the chain and she spits at him, heels scrabbling against the dusty ground even as he starts reeling her in like a fish on a hook. “he can’t hear you, little missy,” he snickers, grin widening the longer nobody shows up.

it’s still on his face when his head slides right off his neck.

blood sprays right before his body crumples like a doll. it takes a second for the others to realise and then the screaming starts— none of them get any farther than three steps before zoro’s cutting them down, swift swings of his sword and almost surgically precise slices rendering them incapacitated if not plain dead.

“sorry i’m late, witch.” the swordsman’s breathing hard, gore dripping off his blades even as he arcs one down and snaps the chain off nami’s leg with a growl. “did they hurt you?”

“no. no, i’m fine,” nami breathes, her smile quivering just a little— not because she’s shaken, no. because she’s pissed.

zoro’s voice is gruff as always, but his hands are careful if not outright gentle as he kneels to inspect her ankle before pulling her to her feet. “stay close,” he mutters, making sure that she’s nodded before cutting them a path through the fray. they bump into chopper next, and the doctor’s out cold over zoro’s shoulder in his regular form by the time sanji joins them to guard their flank. nami’s taken to just using her clima-tact as a bat for now, and it’s admittedly efficient.

she knew zoro would come. he always does. for all that they bicker and snip at each other, zoro has always protected his crew— even when said crew was just three people on what could barely be called a boat. he’d fought for her at arlong park and he fights for her now, his sword slicing over her head at an enemy she can’t see as she ducks low to jam her staff into another’s stomach.

they’ve moved closer to their ship when they find jinbei, then robin, then usopp, then brook and franky, and then zoro’s yelling luff, time to go! and their captain’s launching them all back onto the Sunny with a gleeful cackle that makes nami wheeze a laugh as they land in a mildly painful pile of limbs. somebody’s elbow digs into her ribs and she’s pretty sure that’s sanji’s bony kneecap pressed into her lower back. the swordsman swears as he sets about trying to pry them all apart and luffy seems to be actively fighting him, based on how his cursing’s getting more and more colourful.

behind them, their enemies burn, sliced to pieces. they debrief in the galley and zoro refuses to come away from the door until nami drags him by the ear and sanji threatens to personally shove dessert down his throat. they both know it’s because zoro’s still guarding them from a threat that doesn’t exist anymore.

they know he pretends not to care as much as he does. they know he keeps his words blunt and his swords sharp, but zoro lets luffy hang off him, unfazed, and makes a marginal effort to stick to nami’s budget even when he’s getting booze, and he eats his dessert. every last bit. he lets usopp fire moving targets to slice through so they can both practice. he keeps collateral damage when sparring with sanji to a minimum. he stitches whoever needs it up himself when chopper’s a little too tired.

and when his crew calls, he answers.

(now with a part from nami’s pov!)

[kerizaret]

Breaking point

Based on this post, for @aroace-poly-show 's Hollow☆Wonderland AU

[dragonnarrative-writes]

Part 10 - Blind Retrieve (Interlude)

Slasher Handler Masterlist

Read on AO3

Price calls Ghost for a job.

CW: Discussion of wounds, cannon adjacent discussions of terrorism and violence, Soap (the family dog)

Price calls Simon to work exactly four weeks after you puncture his lung. The wound is healed, with nothing but a bright pink line left behind. You’d gone into a bit of a fit when you’d finally seen it, helping him change the bandages. The drain hadn’t bothered you none, but the scar…

Ghost reports to the base at 2200, masked and kitted as usual. A bit of overkill, for a briefing, but he likes the routine of it. There’s a comfort in the distance it gives him. He doesn’t see many people, but the ones he does see avoid his eyes and find somewhere else to be.

He’s surprised, then, to see Soap pacing the length of the conference room when he arrives. More surprised at the warmth that blooms in his chest at the sight of him.

He’s a little skinny, Ghost observes, as blue eyes light up when they find his. Underfed and not as bulky as he usually likes, jeans and a tee sitting not quite loose on his frame. He lost his weight training privileges in prison, most likely. But his hair is shiny and his skin is clear. When he grins it looks like he has all of his teeth.

“There ye are, ye wee bonnie bastard,” Soap cries, dramatic, dancing forward for a clap on the shoulder. He’s away just as fast, laughing at the way Ghost’s knife barely misses him. “Miss me?”

“’Ardly noticed you was gone,” Ghost answers. “Gaz ‘ere?”

“That’s all I get?” Soap ducks close again, bats Ghost’s half-hearted swat away as he tries to shake Ghost by a vest strap. “Ten months away an’ yer done with me already.”

“Not really interested in ‘ow many dicks you sucked in prison,” Ghost says with a shrug. “Can’t imagine there’s much else that’s noteworthy.”

“Six,” Soap cackles.

A sour faced man, a general by insignia, clears his throat from the other end of the conference room. He visibly blanches when Ghost turns to look at him. The analyst next to him stares for a moment, then looks down at the legal pad in front of him like catching Ghost’s eye might kill him.

It might.

Putting a big hand on top of Soaps head, Ghost reels him in for a one armed embrace. It’s easy to tip forward to knock Soap’s skull against the one adorning his face.

“Good to ‘ave you back,” he mutters. “Been quiet.”

Soap nuzzles in and grins. “’Ardly any chips in this one. ‘S it new?”

“Mm. Gift from my new girl.”

Blue eyes go sharply interested. “Ye’ve a new bird?”

“Told you. Things ‘ve been quiet.”

Price arrives then, Gaz a step behind. They’re both dressed conservatively, jeans, tee, a light jacket. They don’t react to Soap’s presence, probably got their greetings out of the way. It doesn’t stop him from making Gaz put up with a full-body hug, though. Price rolls his eyes as he takes a seat, but he’s got a squirt to the side of his mouth that says he’s happy to have his men accounted for again.

Last to walk in are a couple of self-important looking uniforms who frown when they see Ghost standing in his customary corner. The colonels look sharp, for a late night meeting. Pressed and proper. They look slow. Ghost catalogs their lack of weapons as an afterthought. Ghost does not sit.

The briefing is uninteresting. There are terrorists, because there always are. The target is in London, because it always is. Red tape mans bombs have crossed international lines before anyone could do anything effective. There was an engagement in Bulgaria, and another in Czechia. Shipping containers made it to Lowestoft. Kortac was deployed. Kortac was eliminated. Terrorists are in the wind.

Typical.

“So instead of deploying us first, on our own turf,” Gaz says, tapping his pen on his notebook, “you let terrorists in, then threw a second rate team at the problem and made things worse.”

One of the colonels, the tall, fat one, bristled. “Now see here-”

“If you had this handled, you wouldn’t have called us,” Price interrupts. “So unless you’re paying all of this money to jerk yourselves off over a job well done, you need my men in the line of fire.”

“Easier ways to kill me” Soap chuckles.

“Apparently not,” Price mutters. Louder, he says, “Enough of the bullshit. Time for brass tacks. How many of the hostiles do you need alive?”

The sour faced general scowls, but says. “Two. They’re identified in the dossier.”

The little analyst pipes up. “That doesn’t mean you can just kill-”

“A bit too late for that,” Price rumbles. “If you wanted a low body count, you should have contained all of this before calling in the butchers. But if you’re too squeamish for this, perhaps you should leave before we talk civilian casualties.”

It becomes apparent that the rest of the conversation is just going to be a bunch of mewling around the realities of what they were called in to do. Ghost stops listening and half examines the briefing packet in his hands. He’s bored. Even thinking about the ways he would gut the little analyst after stalking him to his car is dull.

He wants to go home to you.

The thought makes him pause, and he pretends to reread the same line again.

He wants to go home to you. He looks forward to going home. He has a home, now, not just a flat. He has you.

The 141 is far from the suicide squad it was supposed to be. They’re too good, and unrestrained by the law and rules of engagement. They all fight to kill first and win second. Price runs a tight ship. Nothing escapes his scrutiny, Gaz’s perfect analysis. Soap is a wildcard. Ghost is the cold destruction extremists only aspire to. But shit happens when bullets fly. No one is immune to a hole in the neck or the brain.

He has a home to return to now.

“Price,” he says, ignoring the way eyes snap to the skull and away. His team looks at him without flinching. “Takin’ the dog on a walk.”

“No pissing on the carpet,” Price says, to the chagrin of the other colonel, who is stubbornly trying to explain unacceptable collateral to a group of men who kill for fun. Must be new to the game of hiring mercenaries. Gaz has a look in his eye that suggests he may not live to regret opening his mouth.

Soap, for his part, jumps out of his seat with palpable relief. The smile doesn’t leave his face when they leave the room, but the energy about him changes. The opportunity to move makes him sharp. From happy hound to a set of teeth with intent. Even so, he looks up with a sparkle to his eye. “Where to, Ghost?”

So goddamn charming. Ghost can’t help but smile under his mask. “Captain and Gaz got to meet the missus. Think you should, too.”

Soap is quiet for a long time, flipping a key card between his fingers that is certainly not his. Ghost can see his eyes flickering with his racing thoughts as they circle the floor. Eventually, he asks, “Ye think we’re ginnae die, then? Not like ye to phone it in.”

“Not fuckin’ likely,” Ghost snorts. “’S a waste of time, bringin’ oll of us in. Mace’d have it done in 48 hours if they’d called him in in Turkey. No, I jus’ want to introduce my pets to each other.”

“Oh aye?” Soap swipes them through a door and into a cubicle farm. He spots something - a candy bowl, apparently - and stalks forward to mess about at someone’s desk. Over his shoulder, he asks, “Gettin’ tired of ‘er?”

“Quite the opposite,” Ghost chuckles. “Wait til you meet her. I think you’ll get along.”